Keeping the Radical Right at Bay

Let’s Stop Pornography Instead of Pedophiles

Misguided fundie Bill Johnson of the Anti-Democracy Association American Decency Association wants us to put our efforts into banning internet porn instead of catching pedophiles. At least that’s how I read his latest diatribe.

BJ’s rant is entitled A federal prosecutor, myspace and a five year old. His link is broken, because it’s improperly formatted (Hey BJ! Why don’t you learn to use the internet instead of just bitching about it?). Here’s what he was trying to link to: Federal prosecutor is arrested in sex sting. According to the story, John D.R. Atchison of Gulf Breeze, FL, is a federal prosecutor. Allegedly, he flew to Detroit to have sex with a 5-year-old girl! Yow! That’s bad!

Let’s leave it up to the courts to determine Mr. Atchison’s guilt or innocence. Instead, let’s see what old BJ has to say about the case:

Another one falls. A federal prosecutor out of a conservative area in Florida picked up at Detroit Metro [airport].

I’m not sure why BJ felt compelled to mention that Atchison is from a conservative area. The conservative movement in general does seem to have a lot of perverts.

I tried to find evidence that Atchison was an outspoken opponent of “gay sex” or “marital infidelity” or “Hillary”, but I didn’t find anything. That would have made this story sweetly ironic. Since there isn’t any such angle, let’s leave Mr. Atchison to the criminal justice system and instead get back to BJ’s tirade:

Adults risking their reputations to have sex with a minor. What prompts individuals to act so recklessly and often seemingly uncharacteristically? What does such irrational behavior reveal?

I’ll tell you what it reveals. That the human sex urge is extremely strong. In most cases, it operates normally (meaning that the vast majority of adults are sexually attracted to other adults). However, in (relatively) rare cases, the mechanism can go haywire, and some adults become attracted to children. The fact that somebody could be attracted to a 5-year-old shows how incredibly haywire the system can go.

I’m not aware of any evidence that a normally-functioning adult who is attracted to other adults can just suddenly switch to children. The cause of this type of malfunction is very deep-rooted. Apparently BJ thinks otherwise:

If it doesn’t point to the powerful draw of sexual images and words, that grown men with Ph.ds, with families, good reputations and good incomes would risk everything to have sex with a youngster, then I don’t know what it more powerfully communicates.

It more powerfully communicates that BJ is a retard.

BJ has just jumped to a huge unfounded conclusion here. We don’t even know whether Atchison is guilty, and BJ has already diagnosed this man’s entire case. The articles I read did not mention whether the cops found pornography in Atchison’s house or on his computer. And even if they do find porn, what type is it?

Pedophiles primarily keep child pornography, because adult pornography doesn’t do anything for them. Pedophiles are already pedophiles before they encounter porn. If Atchison is a pedo, any adult porn he had didn’t turn him into one.

It’s a good thing, too. Just how fragile does BJ think the human brain is? Can you imagine how horrible it would be to actually live in a world like the one BJ imagines? That all it takes is a couple of erotic images to turn ordinary family men into roving gangs of child predators?

I’ve known numerous guys who have spent way too much time at the titty bars. The only damage this has done to them is to deplete their supply of one-dollar bills. By BJ’s logic, they should have all become Incredible-Hulk-like raging infernos who serially-mount every living thing they see.

If seasoned adults are stirred and manipulated by images, especially pornographic images, then there is certainly cause to be concerned for our children.

Certainly adults can be aroused by images, but what’s his point? If he’s worried that our teenagers are going to turn into raving sex machines, that’s going to happen with or without pornography, or does BJ not remember puberty? (I suspect that BJ has indeed forgotten his own puberty, having successfully repressed those memories decades ago for “being dirty”.)

Obviously, there are untold numbers of adults who can’t handle the wide-open nature of the Internet.

I agree. I just happen to think this “untold number” is quite small, though. What does BJ want to do? Shut down the whole internet just because a few people are porn addicts?

But what about the millions who even this day have been surfing the net.

What about them?

They are no where near to trading reputation for sex with a child.

And they never will be, because they aren’t in that tiny fraction of the population with miswired brains.

But they are looking and lusting, perhaps masturbating,…

Whoa, BJ! Keep a civil tongue! I’m eating here!

…becoming desensitized and/or addicted. Certainly their thought life is being incrementally corrupted.

Certainly there is some desensitization going on. There is some intensely deviant porn out there, and that’s partly because porn is so commonplace that some people have to seek out more intense stuff. As far as I know, all normal adults who seek more intense porn keep in the realm of adult pornography. I have not seen any data that suggests that normal (non-pedophile) adults who get bored with simple porn switch over to kiddie porn.

Conclusion

So where did BJ go with this article? He starts off talking about how horrible it is that somebody would seek to have sex with a 5-year-old girl. Then he spends the rest of the article talking about internet porn. What’s wrong with him? Where is BJ’s outrage at pedophilia? Where is BJ’s outrage that sexual predators are using the internet to prowl for girls? All BJ wants to do is eliminate porn!

First of all, that isn’t feasible. Secondly, it would do nothing to stop the pedophiles.

If we follow BJ’s recommendation, we should put our efforts into chasing porn all over the internet and just assume that the pedophiles will magically go away.

I have a better idea, BJ. Why don’t we put our efforts into stopping and catching these scumbags?

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on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 9:43 pm and is filed under BoF Toon, Censorship, Culture.
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8 Responses to “Let’s Stop Pornography Instead of Pedophiles”

This post does a good job of shining light on the typical fundamentalist mindset. They have to believe that God exists, and that God possesses certain characteristics, such as omnipotence, omniscience, and above all, a love for everyone. Never mind that such qualities are mutually exclusive to one another, and that the barest exercise of reason is sufficient to show this. The house of cards that they’ve built up to believe in will come crashing down the minute annoying, inconvenient facts destroy the illusion.

Which, of course, explains why whenever somebody does something that the religious loonies disapprove of, they think that the offender sat down and consciously weighed the merits of committing such an act. They imagine that one who is gay made a conscious decision to like members of the same gender. I wonder when BJ decided to become a heterosexual. They cannot possibly consider that the loving, all-knowing deity they believe in would allow someone to be born gay, or, as you have pointed out, with serious mental abnormalities that lead to this kind of tragic behavior. It undercuts the entire nature of the being they think is up there watching over us. This is, really, a variation of the problem of evil, which is perhaps one of the most damning arguments against God’s existence.

If evil exists (murder, disease, famine, Jon Tesh) and God is omnipotent, then he passively permits evil and is not all-loving. If evil exists and God can do nothing about it, then God is not omnipotent. And clearly, evil must exist, otherwise what would be the whole point of Christianity? What’s a poor fundie to do? Aha! blame the evil on us. It’s the porn sites and the people who choose to visit them that are to blame. Of course, the gays and lesbians are at fault too. (These fundies are so sexually repressed they can’t even appreciate the beauty of two hot women “getting to know each other better”)

I’m not trying to excuse bad behavior. Far too many people have done vile, unforgivable things to others, and the responsibility is theirs alone. But looking for the reasons why people do these things is imperative. Neuroscience, biology, and evolution, among other disciplines, can take us far toward a greater understanding of right and wrong. This requires thinking, and unfortunately, fundies are not capable of this, which explains why they never make any sense. Invoking God only serves to show how dim-witted these people really are.

more to the political point, i can’t communicate how fucking sick i am of being told that porn will make us all into perverted child-killing wastes of meat. there is no statistical correlation, other than the one hypothesised and (oddly) never actually studied by various religious groups, between sexual crime rates and the permissibility / availability of pornography in a country.

in reality, it’s more likely to function as a release for sexual desires that go unfulfilled than to build them up to the point where some fucker kills and rapes a child; as it’s been pointed out, you don’t buy porn to make you horny, you buy it because you already are, regardless of whether you’re a paedophile or not.

My goodness, BJ is a retard! For fuck’s sake, according to his logic I ought to be out at least weekly scouring the interwebs and dark back alleys for children to molest. I’m trying, but I can’t seem to muster the necessary sexual urge here. I wonder if BJ has any pointers for me? He seems so sure and all…

lizard, he probably would offer advice, but he’s in his happy place right now. after all, if porn makes us nihilistic, paedophilic serial murderers, you gotta wonder what kind of masochism it must therefore take to get you to be nice.

You know, I really think that fundies problems with porn are a matter of temptation. They WANT it, but they aren’t supposed to have it. Therefore these unreasonable and retarded efforts to get rid of it. It’s a lot easier to avoid temptation if it’s not out there. BJ, in his desperate attempt to link pedophilia and internet porn, seems to be following the mold.

Yes, but isn’t it logistically impossible to eradicate porn from the internet?
What solutions do these anti-pornography people propose?
Let’s make porn illegal, then, and wait.
Anybody remember Prohibition? Wasn’t that fun, what with the speakeasies and the gangsters and the mobsters and the tommy guns…
Why is my sensuality of concern to these fuckers?